Father Jacques Renaud is a French Catholic priest and the headmaster for the North Dakota Boarding School for Native Americans. He is cruel and abusive, using corporal punishment and torture on both students and faculty.
Biography[]
He is first seen in his office after Teonna's vicious attack on Sister Mary. He reprimands Sister Mary for her excessive cruelty on her students, making her recite a Bible verse as he slaps her arms with the same level of cruelty she exuded on Teonna. He then turns to Teonna, where he remarks that while he may have compassion, he has no mercy for her violence. He then ruthlessly slaps her with a ruler as well.
After yet another fiasco with Sister Mary where Teonna used her Crow language, Father Renaud has Teonna taken to spend the night in the hotbox outside as punishment due to her violence during dinner when she refused to eat maggot-infested food and using her Crow tongue in defiance. He condescendingly talks down to Teonna, calling her Crow language filth and that he will not tolerate it in his school, threatening to bury her should she ever speak that language again, while using his native French tongue. When the morning came, she was released from the hotbox and is taken with fever.
He later discovers that Sister Mary and Sister Alice have been murdered. He confronts her cousin, Baapuxti, whom he bound to a chair in his office. She is ruthlessly interrogated, torturing her with beatings. She refuses to tell him where Teonna has escaped to, speaking for the final time in her Crow language. Enraged, Father Renaud beats her to death, stomping on her skull. He has her body wrapped in cloth and buried in an unmarked grave off the school premises.
He sends Brother Romero, Brother Liam, and Brother Cillian after Teonna. When the priests haven't returned to the school in a week, he enlists the help of the US Marshal Services to help him track down Teonna. When Marshal Kent asked about the cemetary at his school, he only stated that enough deaths have happened to warrant a graveyard, not mentioning the outcome of their deaths. They come across the bodies of the priests and discover that Teonna did not act alone. With the Marshals, they deduce that Teonna may be escaping to the South where she would be able to blend in the Comanches. They decide to take the train to get there before she does, and ride off.
They landed on Comanches during he bore witness to Marshal Kent's brutal tactics and willfulness to use a child as a body shield, expressing disgust for such actions, while Kent calls out Renaud's hypocrisy for having a graveyard at his school. After Kent killed Pete Plenty Clouds without justification, Renaud, now disgusted with the Marshal's tactics, kills Kent. He later discovers Teonna and Runs His Horse returning to find Pete dead lying next to Marshal Kent. He shoots and kills Runs His Horse in the dead of the night, and at gunpoint, demands Teonna to repent. Teonna refused, so Renaud pulled the trigger to find his weapon ran out of bullets. Teonna throws a handful of hot coals in his face which severely burned him, and stabs Renaud several times in the torso before finishing him off with her father's gun.
His body is later found by Marshall Fossett and Two Spears, the latter of whom quickly determines what happened. Teonna is arrested, but not before she tells her story to the sympathetic Marshall. With Renaud and Kent dead, there are no witnesses or evidence tying Teonna to the murders at the school and Fossett chooses not to charge her with killing Renaud, declaring his and Kent's deaths to be unrelated. As a result, the charges against Teonna are dropped and she is set free to find a new life.
Appearances[]